In a mesh network a route between a source node and a destination node flows through retransmitting nodes. These retransmitting nodes take part in retransmitting the message sent from the source node to the destination node. When sending a message in a standard mesh network over a single physical medium each network node has to stop transmitting and release the physical medium to allow another unit to transmit over the same physical medium. This limitation may prevent collisions among messages sent from different nodes transmitting concurrently. Thus, a limiting factor in mesh networks is the number of times a message needs to be retransmitted (repeated) on its route from the source node to the destination node in the network. The delay of a single retransmission is a factor of the message length and the processing time of the network node and other parameters. The retransmitting nodes in the route may cause delay as they must complete receiving the message before they start resending it. This limitation causes delay that is substantially the multiplication of the number of retransmitting nodes by the retransmission time duration.
As a result, different nodes in the mesh network may have different access times depending of the number of retransmissions. Additionally, the average transmission delay between two nodes in a mesh network may increase with the number of nodes of the network by a factor of LOGX(N) where N is the number of nodes in the network and X is the average number of neighboring nodes (nodes with direct link) per node.